Sunday, March 15, 2015

UC Irvine and the U.S. Flag

The week before last at the University of
California, Irvine, the legislative branch of the student government voted to
ban the display of the U.S. flag and other national flags in the lobby adjacent
to the offices of the student government.The rationale was that the U.S. flag “constructs paradigms of conformity
and sets homogenized standards”, inhibiting “freedom of speech, in a space that
aims to be as inclusive as possible”.

The ban sparked outrage and accusations
of treachery and a lack of patriotism, a veto from the student president, and a
rebuke from the UC Irvine Chancellor.

My own initial take was that the student
legislative action didn’t seem like the best use of their resources, or the
smartest way of making a political statement.Issues of more immediate concern might be the privatization of the UC
system, the transfer of costs to students from the public, and calls to
instrumentalize higher education in the U.S. and beyond.Unlike, for example, the divestment campaign,
there are no materially improved outcomes for anyone.And banning things for their “offensive”
nature seems like a substitute for a more trenchant and serious argument.In a strange way the students’ actions were
reminiscent of the administrators who increasingly use the invocation of
‘civility’ as a way to police the behavior of others, and suggest that the most
important thing about a university campus is that the goings-on there offend the fewest people possible.

For these reasons, the ban left the
students looking a bit silly.

But the reaction from the public was
typically hysterical, with people slinging around accusations of treachery and
decrying what they saw as an appalling lack of patriotism on campuses.The student legislators also earned
themselves a rebuke
from the UC Irvine Chancellor, Howard Gillman.

The Chancellor’s message offered a
wholesale repudiation of the students’ actions, decrying them as the behavior
of an unrepresentative minority.The
Chancellor began by noting that on any university campus one might expect to
hear views that are “unconventional and even outrageous”.The Chancellor’s formulation suggested that
there is some relationship between the action of questioning—an action
fundamental to the purpose of universities—and behavior that is “outrageous”,
and by extension somehow unacceptable.

Later in his letter, Chancellor Gillman
made the jump from disingenuousness to outright stupidity.It was “outrageous and indefensible”, he
wrote, that these students “would question the appropriateness of displaying
the American flag on this great campus”.Gillman is himself an academic, and one might therefore have expected a
greater degree of understanding about the role of universities in civic life.

Universities are designed to be spaces
for people to explore and as much as might be possible, act on questions of
moral, philosophical, and material importance.The purpose of a university is to create a sphere of critical
intellectual inquiry shielded from the over-mighty hand of the state and its
ability to intimidate and curtail thought.They are places where no questions should be off-limits and where
students should be able to—indeed, perhaps encouraged to—question the rituals
of obeisance our larger society pays to brittle, dangerous national myths.

Gillman’s concluding remarks illustrated
the need for critical thought.He
proclaimed grandly, “[UC Irvine is] an institution created by the world’s
greatest democracy in order to serve this democracy, and we feel privileged to
be able to serve the cause of freedom and progress under the American flag”.

This simple-minded and frankly quite
ignorant reading of history by a university Chancellor demonstrates the
pervasiveness of the fatuous and destructive patriotism that characterizes much
of our national thinking.

The idea that the U.S. is the “world’s
greatest democracy” is the stuff of all-too-easily spoofed political speeches,
not of serious conversation, and demands some scrutiny.

By what measure is the U.S. the “world’s
greatest democracy”?

We have a voting system in which a
national candidate with the most votes can lose the election to a candidate
with fewer votes.We have an antiquated
“first past the post” voting system that limits us to choosing between only two
parties, keeps small parties marginal, and can result in one party winning the
majority of the votes across the country and winning fewer seats in our
Congress. We have one legislative body
that gives as much representation to a state with a million people as to
California with its nearly 40 million inhabitants.We have our election on a week-day, and don’t
grant people a voting holiday, and in many states moves are afoot to
disenfranchise large numbers of voters, using methods associated with some of
the many bleak and unjust moments in our country’s history.

We have a democracy that gives precious
little to its people.Instead of
recognizing the equality of citizens, or even any aspiration towards equality,
we have a political framework that spurns the opportunity to provide public
welfare in favour of fetishizing economic inequality.We give corporations rights while rigging the
system against our middle and working classes.

And well might students question the idea
of serving “the cause of freedom and progress under the American flag”.

Our country has a long history of
colonialism and imperialism.Beginning
in 2001, under the American flag and in the name of our values, our country
developed a program of terror and torture, in which people were abducted and
held without trial, and subjected to extraordinary cruelty and
degradation.Our leaders who engineered
these acts of state terrorism, and the functionaries who carried them out have
since been shielded from punishment.

In 2003, our country launched and illegal
war of aggression, pummeling the people of another nation with a bombardment
meant to “shock and awe”.In the course
of a colonial-style occupation, our government destroyed the infrastructure of
that country, gutted its already damaged civic institutions, and turned
mercenaries loose on its streets, retreating into an armed encampment derided
as the “emerald city”.

Our country grants unconditional backing
to the government in Israel, one of the world’s last colonial regimes, as well
as to the authoritarian monarchy in Saudi Arabia.Our President uses a “disposition matrix”,
what amounts to a lethal profiling system, to murder people abroad without
trial.And massive rogue intelligence
agencies vacuum up citizens’ information without oversight.Even when it becomes known that such agencies
have lied to Congress and the public, their leadership goes unpunished and
their behavior unchecked.

And none of these behaviours are without
precedent.But what they make clear is
that we are not the world’s greatest democracy.Given the ascendancy of the American plutocracy and the strength of our
terrorist military-intelligence complex, it’s questionable to what extent we
remain a democracy.

To those who would argue that student
government is not the place to debate matters of this scale, I would offer the
reminder that students are the people who will have to live the longest and
contend the hardest with the world being created at this moment.It is also worth considering that while much
of our country buried its head in the sand, students have issued some of the
first calls to action about critical issues in our country’s recent history,
whether the Vietnam War, Civil Right, apartheid
in South Africa, Israeli colonialism, and the economic inequality that
increasingly defines our own society.

Few people today would argue that
prosecuting the war in Vietnam was in the public interest.And outside of the right wing of the
Republican Party, opponents of civil rights in the 1960s would find few
defenders.The Republican Party’s
embrace of South Africa’s National Party, and its designation of Nelson Mandela
as an enemy of the state are decisions that have not weathered time well.And I suspect that in a decade or two,
criticism of our unbending support for Israeli colonialism will look similarly
prescient.

The students’ efforts to ban national
flags doesn’t get at any single issue, and isn’t the best way of making the
point they seem to have in mind.But
their broader points about the nature of U.S. power in the world, and what the
flag represents for many are well-taken.And the snarling response they received both from the public at large
and from university administrators charged with maintaining the intellectual
integrity of the University of California is a strong indicator that the issues
they have raised need to be debated, and not dismissed as “indefensible”
criticism.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.